The other day I was taking the GREs, and before they let you in to take the exam you have to read a bit of paper about the test rules and blah blah whatever. Then they make you recopy a paragraph saying that you’ve read the above and agree to it.
That bit I understand, but what I don’t get is why the woman proctering the exam insisted that it be written in cursive and that anyone writing in print would have to do it again.
I don’t find this to be an egregious imposition or anything (although I am a print person), I’m just wondering what the reasoning behind it is.
I’m a “print person,” too. My WAG guess is that it is easier to identify (or authenticate) someone’s cursive handwriting than their print handwriting. As a teacher who sees homework papers from 90 different students every day, I generally find it easier to identify an unnamed paper if it is in cursive (and I can compare it to another set of papers from the same class). Some people print very distinctively, but I see a LOT of chicken-scratch print from many students and it is hard to distinguish between them, even when I’m trying to find a match with some of their other homework papers.
Cursive writing is much harder to forge. Pen lifts and pressure tracks make it easy to tell when someone is tracing or duplicating a signature as opposed to originating one.
My handwriting is atrocious. I have not written in cursive since I left high school and it was required. I do not know that there is a LEGAL requirement anywhere to write in cursive. I did, however, once get in a “discussion” with a highway patrolman when I asked him, smartly, “Does anyone tell you how to sign you name?”
The practitioners of some professions seem to pride themselves on poor penmanship. I think doctors should be required to print prescriptions legibly in the name of public safety. I had a doctor once that had all his prescriptions typed just to be sure, he died of lung cancer two years ago.
I had exactly the same experience when I took the GREs in 1980. They couldn’t start the test until everyone finished the rules statement, and it took me ten minutes longer than anyone else.
As a kid, I transfered from a school which taught cursive in the fourth grade to one which taught cursive in the third grade, and, while I did at some point learn how the letters were formed, I have never used cursive in my life (other than for my signature, which is totally illegible). Thus, when required to do so, it took forever, looked like hell, and left me feeling like shit in front of all the other graduate-students-to-be.
I’m glad to have seen this thread, as I have occasionally wondered if I had misinterpreted the instructions…did they say the statement had to be written and I assumed they meant cursive, or did they explicitly instruct us to use cursive (it was twenty-three years ago, after all). I’m glad to see that I wasn’t crazy after all…